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they’ll have to be smarter than us. Their superintelligence would gust them off on uncharted, unguessable pathways. The profs at the futurology foundations worry about human obsolescence and machine supreme but I’m trying to look on the bright side: those bots might get into daydreaming and lounging and 1,000-yard gazing. They could start watching the treeline blur, looking for the connections in the atom weave, even craving an altered state. Bots gone beatnik. Bots as life/love-bedazzled as we organics. Introspection as a consequence of self-reflective consciousness.

on a hot fence. I waited for one to settle. Waiting for the words to come.

a Ken Kesey title, took a few minutes to come to me out of the fog. It was Sometimes a Great Notion. And I was thinking of the pranksters and the Further bus and Cassady flipping hammers with his eyes all wild and Marty Feldman – this is walking to the station Sunday a.m. to buy a coffee from the girls still half-asleep, half-hidden behind cellophaned croissants and the humming milk-froth machines, must get a copy of Young Frankenstein, see if it holds up – and that book title struck me as odd and at once I understood that I’d done this before, some other year, some other morning walk for coffee, yeah it’s a lyric and then I got Goodnight, Irene and Lead Belly and the line,

Sometimes I have a great notion

To jump into the river and drown.

And that’ll get you into American roots and blues and from there you might get to Charlie Poole and If the River was Whiskey and another great line,

I looked down the road just as far as I could see

A man had my woman and the blues had me.

So I got it playing on my phone speaker, in my shirt pocket, for the walk back over the track, clutching my styrofoam coffee cup, a fine drizzle, spooking the early-bird tourists here to park in the gravel yards around the station, marvelling at the low grey clouds. Cassady died of exposure walking down a railway track. Just set off walking into the Mexican night in his beat jeans and white t-shirt, like he didn’t care if he got anywhere. He’d had enough of the pranksters and the San Fran scene. The Grateful Dead played their last ever concert yesterday. Ferlinghetti’s still giving interviews, the rest are gone. The roads keep coming and then they’re gone. And I was thinking, do people still read Sometimes a Great Notion, do they have the time for 700 pages of Oregon angst? But I can’t answer that. All I can do is order a copy when I get home, and hold fast. Hold fast and step on.

by the Tintin house. Shuttered windows, louche sports car on the gravel and callers at strange hours. Did our reporter scale the wall with Snowy a-sniff the funny-money ink, ears a-twitch those clanking sounds from the basement? Was the gang boss necromancer consulting with his brazen head in the library, saw a vision of our sleuth in the grounds and set loose the house gorilla? In the chase, the good duo tip-toed along the bough, luring the ape forwards and with its bound the bark tore and the beast lay stunned on the pavement. Was that Calculus ghost-peering from the back window of a departing car? And where’s the captain, but rabble-rousing down The Anchor with assorted North Oxford salts and stowaways. Books endure, symbols and story remnants to pollinate these ride-by dreams.

and fresh linen for Dad. Jabbed up for the hols and looking for new premises. The will is there but the way is enmisted, the path lost in taiga shadows. Where is my golden, lakeside dacha, curtains raised to the window sills to thwart lurking assassins? I’ll have to settle for the semi in Sunnymead, arcane texts shed-scribbled in the gaps between car-ferrying to athletics meets. There’s paradise there, for those wise enough to see it.

before she came along, walked her as a pup and then her pups and their pups. We’ve cut and tramped the grass around this island, heard the wind in the same trees. Yesterday, we climbed down to the pebble splash at Egypt and I saw three dolphins breaching out on the waves. The dog stood watching and then barrelled away into the bracken. There was nothing smart to say and the dolphins were gone around the point so I followed after her. I am time itself, watching the seasons of life tumble by for this dog and me.

no spinning tuft of lawn under the sky. I’m up in the trees, with the vistas, head in the clouds. But I dream of getting down to earth again. I’d like just enough grass to lie out, star-shaped on the sod and feel the shoots of myself flash down through crust and mantle, crackle upwards into the airless elbow-room of the upper atmosphere. I want to feel the overseeing sun on my skin, immense and burning bright. I’d like an apple tree with blush fruit and a squat doorway that leads to nobody-knows and hidden walks and glades and all around that green calm. If I can get my garden I shall cultivate a sunflower, and watch it attend and turn, helio slave like all us living things. And I’ll let out a scream to the sky, a cheer to the molecules, an interstellar call of thanks.

in still air and shadows at the Colindale RAF museum. They look empty, no sense of the crews that blew life into them. Lambert’s cracking up in Len Deighton’s Bomber, he’s starting to think the machines fly themselves to target, that the war’s all about steel and hydraulics and engineered precision killing. It reminds me of the museum visits – the crews are missing. And how did people even fit inside these things? I think of a time trying to drop down through the driver’s hatch of a tank, the sense that the machine’s creators had taken a solid lump of metal, scooped out a space just big enough to crawl into, a sleeping bag crevice wrapped in wires, pipes and sharp edges and then pressed the driver in, tearing his elbows and knees and face in his scramble to get away from the bullets and the blasts and the battlefield roar. I wonder if Lambert’s right and future wars might be fought with no crews, just a satellite link and machine logic. But then I’m out with the kids today and we reach a village, see the memorial to the crews stationed here a lifetime ago. No graffiti or scarring on the prop, only the paint wearing away. Flowers and a few crosses, the grass clipped short. War touches people and lingers deep. It stems and ends from human will.

before a day of rain. I stood in the park, watching the canopy lit up with the promise of another summer. Old eyes dazzled by the light. Strands and cobwebs and specks of debris in the vitreous humour darting like birds, my own Plato shadows playing out on the skyscape. But I know the truth. There’s no way to clean the lights, this track only runs one way. And I remember the conversation with the gaffer at the start of the week, he can’t be far off retiring, the leaves all down in a carpet over his lawn after the blow this weekend he said, as though it was autumn already. He’s seen more seasons than me, he’s got the stare, each iris as faded and world-knowing as the rim of my ghost-summer sky. All the truths are in nature’s passing and returns, the river and season flow, my football practice glow.

but I enjoyed the walk down Gordon Street more than anything on the stage. I miss the squares, the quiet places away from the traffic and the thrumming, restless crowd.